All or nothing
An excerpt from Seeing No-Self
It can be useful to know about two common problems that come up during inquiry. Awareness of them can help us identify the situation when it occurs and ensure we don’t stay stuck there.
The first problem is when we understand no-self conceptually and try to make ourselves believe in no-self. We try to believe we don’t exist.
This quickly deteriorates into: “There’s nothing to do, and it’s all pointless, so why am I even alive?” Some turn away from nonduality and inquiry here, believing it to be nihilism.
The remedy is to see clearly what we are: the Awareness side of the spiral. We are not nothing, we are everything!
But we can get stuck here as well, in the spiritual ego. Now we try to make ourselves believe that we’re all-encompassing Awareness! However, this is still a self. The difference is that now it’s trying to believe it is God.
The remedy lies on the opposite side of the spiral—seeing clearly that there is no self!
It’s crucial to see both sides of the equation.
This is an excerpt from the new edition of Seeing No-Self: Essential Questions to Reveal Our Nondual Nature. I’m sharing an excerpt here every Tuesday until release on March 3rd. You can order worldwide on Amazon, from most online booksellers, or via Bookshop.org in the UK and US to support local bookstores. It’s available in ebook and paperback formats.
